He stayed behind in the classroom for a few minutes, straightening desks, pushing in chairs, securing the wall safe, and digitally initialing the affidavits he had to sign in the presence of the school’s compliance officer that morning promising not to share any information about what or whom he taught that day. Not a post, not a tweet, not an update – not even a word.

He took those affidavits seriously. You never knew who was listening on the subway or looking over your shoulder at the noodle stand. No one would stop him- or herself from reporting a teacher; everyone wanted that job; narcing out a non-compliant teacher was the easiest way to create an opening in line.

He was sorry he stayed, but only a little. By the time he got out into the hall, the line for daily wages stretched all the way from the office to the library, where they key the books. He would probably be here for a few hours, waiting for the others to collect their pay and contest the charges nickeled and dimmed out of it. Yesterday he had been dinged for the janitorial pay it took to straighten his room. He guessed it was better to wait and get more pay than to rush out and be docked again on a “lack of organization” charge. Too many of those and he might as well not get in line at the beginning of the day any more.

Everyone in line kept quiet. There wasn’t much to talk about apart from the day, and talking about the day wasn’t allowed. Moreover, chatting up colleagues during contract time meant another charge, so no one wanted to risk being seen as a chatterbox after school – maybe there would be a charge for that; maybe the compliance officer was watching; maybe someone would say something in violation of their contract, lose his or her spot, and drag everyone around him or her into a compliance hearing costing each witness days of work.

He turned on his little cloud of privacy, catching up with friends, family, the news – and his teeter-totter finances – in his glasses, which he wore strictly for computing and the air of nerdery that they lent him in line and in the classroom. It was good to look a little cowered. Compliance officers liked that, and school discipline asked fewer questions after they took a kid from your room if you looked a little wimpy. More people in line wore glasses than not, but everyone had a way out into their own lives at the end of the day – a retinal display, a smart piece of jewelry, a haptic display projected from a little flourosynthetic me card folded up in a purse or wallet, pixel noise encrypted to resolve in the owner’s sensory cortex or under a cop’s broadbeam flashlight.

He caught up with his life, pushed some music into his brain, and then started spinning up prediction after prediction of how much he would make today and how far it would get him tonight. He’d have his dinner and his data paid for; he’s have subway fare back to his folks’ house. Maybe he’d have enough for that cheap bubble motel down the street from the bar his friends liked. If he could keep up his habit of saving a few bucks a day, he’d be sure to have enough to re-up his license at the end of the month, and maybe he’d have enough to buy an upgrade that would let him add a grade level or a few more students to his permissions list.

Everything shuffled ahead.

As he and his turn at the teller approached one another, he got nervous. His stomach started turning. It felt like his insides wanted to fold themselves sideways. He hated this part of the day. He hated knowing what he did wrong more than he hated not knowing. He hated seeing his charges more than he hated bad pay. He hated having to argue in public, at the head of the line, more than he hated the charges against him.

He heard that at nicer schools in the suburbs, there was a teller in every room – that every teacher got paid in private after taking all the time in the world to make their rooms just so. Brats, he thought. They don’t know what teaching really is.

It was his turn at last. Only a few teachers were queued behind him; he was glad there was only a small audience left. He hoped he wouldn’t say anything stupid. In his whole career, he had only seen two teachers get too specific in line. They made the mistake of talking about what had happened in class those days; they broke their affidavits. They lost their wages and licenses and picked up heavy misdemeanors which kept them from voting until they completed prison service hours staffing a feed line or something at a jail.

He wiped the data off the lenses of his glasses and turned off the music. He stepped up and slid his me card into the light on the counter outside the office door. The glass wall of the office had been dimmed so the teachers could’t make eye contact with the teller or compliance office, or argue with anyone in particular for that matter. Frosted letters on the door glowed with a soft light: “City Employees Only.” It was another penalty for any teacher who went in there.

“David Cruz?”

“Yes.”

“Do you swear that you complied and comported your teaching today – to the best of your ability – in accordance with the affidavits you filed this morning with the school compliance officer?”

“I do.”

“Thank you Mr. Cruz.”

“Thank you.”

“Fifty-dollar flat-rate for a teacher in good-standing, plus your two-dollar incentive under the ‘Men in the Classroom’ act, minus charges today.”

“Thank you. May I hear the charges?”

“Certainly, Mr. Cruz. Mr. Cruz, in non-trivial, non-terminative violation of your affidavits today, you went off-script during instruction a total of seven times, which accounts for the first seven dollars of charges. Those departures from the script negatively impacted the National Academic Proficiency test-passage actuarial matrix predictions of one hundred thirty-three out of one hundred forty-seven students you taught today. Those impacts were calculated to be non-statistically significant, however, docking you only ten cents per student, or thirteen dollars thirty cents. Those departures are predicted to benefit ten of the remaining students, but not in a statistically significant way, which means you do not merit extra pay for them. You did not exceed your materials or discipline allotment. Your left your room well organized. You will end the day at thirty-one dollars and seventy cents.”

“Could you tell me how I deviated from the script?”

“According to records, Mr. Cruz, you provided unproven and possibly confusing metaphors seven times, and in five of those instances you used flagged, though not prohibited, words. Would you like to purchase a review of the records?”

“No. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Cruz. Will there be anything else.”

“No. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Cruz. Would you like a receipt?”

“No.”

“Very well, Mr. Cruz. Your me card has been credited thirty-one dollars and seventy cents. You are over fifty-percent likely to be chosen as a teacher with us tomorrow. I am required to to inform you that we are experiencing a shortage of male teachers in the City Middle, Low Woods, and Banner Square neighborhoods, and that you are over seventy-five percent likely to be chosen as a teacher tomorrow at any school in any of those districts.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Cruz. Next.”

David Cruz bought some tenth rate Pad Thai and rode the subway to his parents’ home thinking about his future. He came home to an empty house; both parents were out working. He didn’t see them often.

Today was okay; he came out a few dollars ahead after paying for dinner and his ride. Maybe he would be able to teach 200 students a day next year, or add an art endorsement to his license – there were still a few schools that liked art and used it as a cover for school discipline. No scripts in those classes. Just quiet. Kids who knew that if they acted up in art, they would be out of school next on heavy misdemeanors. The kind of cushy job he imagined those suburban teachers had. Maybe he could get a few days of that a month, clear his head, practice his lines, pitch that perfect fifty-dollar game.

He fell asleep thinking about what he would do if more of the kids he taught this year managed to pass the NAP than fail it. What would he do with all those fractional bonuses? Commute to the suburbs for a few weeks? See what that was like?

What would he do if they all failed? Where would he have to live so he could work? Who would hire him then?

How would he pay back all those wages?

No more metaphors, he thought. No more going off-script. He could push in those chairs; he could push out those lines.

The ideas have been keeping me thinking for a while; thanks for the mention and comment!

Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief portrays a very literal technology-mediated privacy and panoptic society for those interested, but is less about schooling (although I think think everything is about schooling).

Maddy tapped her foot nervously until the voice in her head told her to stop – her brother reminding her that Mr. Cruz was already on the brink of too many violations to be a viable teaching candidate at her school for weeks to come. If today’s plans didn’t work out, they needed him back. They had carefully selected Mr. Cruz from the dozens of teachers that Maddy was subjected to at school. Maddy felt a kind of bad about that, because she actually enjoyed paying attention when he was in class, just to see how many times he could go off script. She didn’t think he even did it deliberately, but he seemed to get caught up in the moment. Mostly she had experienced teachers who were totally on script. There were the rare teachers who seemed to relish their moment of anarchy, going off script and inciting free thought, but those teachers didn’t come back.

Maddy felt her time at City Middle would soon be ending. Her initial transfer had been an embarrassment, both to her and her family. She had brain-scanned into City Tech and her parents were especially proud they had produced her naturally, but either she had been too clever or the brain scan technology too antiquated to notice the learning disability (LD). It showed up in math class, where her test scores on the monthly NAP fell marginally over a 6-month period. Her parents filed for a learning assessment and the results had shown a LD that could luckily be dealt with through neuro-magnetic therapy. Unfortunately, her latest NAP score put her outside the slim standard deviation for City Tech and as the compliance officer explained, she would be reassigned to City Middle until the therapy had concluded and she tested back within range.

At first, Maddy was horrified at the prospect of attending City Middle, not only because of the sinking feeling that she was letting her parents down, but also because of its crappy reputation. After the first week, she actually found some things to appreciate about City Middle. City Tech had been a pressure cooker of high expectations and extreme competition. On the other hand, City Middle had the modest ambition of trying to get a majority of its student body to pass the NAPs. She didn’t actually get much out of her classroom experience, but she still had the high tech gear embedded from City Tech and with a few programming tweaks, she found she could piggyback on City Middle’s packet stream and explore the external web.

Her brother had helped with the mods and continued to enhance her tech to trigger the few teacher script phrases that indicated student interaction was required. It was because of her 6-year old brother, that she was even considering this crazy plan. If her parents had been proud of her, they were ecstatic over her brother. His brain scan had tested him out of preschool, so he was free to plug into school from home. Mostly he eavesdropped on her at school, enticing her away from its reality into the virtual worlds he had hacked. Next year, he would be going away to school and this summer, his tech would be upgraded. These events, once eagerly anticipated, now took on a pall of dread. Mr. Cruz, or more specifically, his current tech grade and the older tech equipment he could afford, might help them determine what was really going to happen to Adam when he matriculated.

Great share, Kim – I’m glad to read about what else is going on David’s world. I hope other folks follow your lead and round out the future. What stikes me in reading your piece and thinking back to David is how close we are to all of this; in fact, the technologies, systems, and policies all already exist in fairly mature forms.

I value Mandy’s view of David, who beats himself up for going off script. They should talk – very Guy Montag/Clarisse McClellan.

I read that this morning, too, as well as the warehouse labor article to which it linked. Everything already exists. A little more complacency and coöperation inside the profession and a little more legislation remixing licensure, subbing, and temping, and voila.

I am ready to make the film version. Send me the script when it is done and we can get a kickstarter campaign going.. Reminds me of one of my favorite movies, The Trial by Orsen Welles with Anthony Perkins.

I have a short narrative doing in the draft phrase also….

I hope more of us share us of our creative writing, or art, or film work with the Coop!

I thinks parts of it already are. I wonder about choices: stay the course to preserve school as a system; reverse course and let the system suffer through immune reactions; abandon ship; evacuate ship; scuttle ship.

While the story follows David, that choice reflects how little the collective we pay attention to kids in our education debates. Whatever happens next should be for them – better relationships; more personally meaningful work; schools as fulfilling, community-based participatory culture. Many tings would be improvements.

There’s a Film Festival coming to Traverse City, MI. soon. Yes, Michael Moore’s film festival. I think your brilliant ideas, the tempo of writing and, yes an internal voice, and an external voice (camera as voyeur speaking to what is being seen) would do well. This short vignette of yours has the potential to be, at the least, done as a non-visual monologue (like Joe Frank). If extended in content, a short film. Seeing from within and without Cruz. I saw another person’s extension to your piece in the replies to this piece–additional characters. It could become a new vision, narrative, of what’s not only happening now, in its inchoate form, but where our lives, teachers’ lives, are trending. Maybe we could get Moore to take a look. You’ve really hit upon the texture, the quintessence of a view in the day in a life. This is blazing and touching. Moore would be a great go to person on this. It applies so well to his sense of spectre. This start pushes it from currency to futurism. Beautiful.